Brookfield's Phil Wharton and a rendering of Manhattan West

The Far West Side earned the latest confirmation of its potential as a residential neighborhood when office developer Brookfield Office Properties recently said it was considering adding 900 apartments to its Manhattan West project, according to the New York Post. The area already has thousands of new rental units from developers such as TF Cornerstone, Glenwood Management and the Related Companies, and has thousands more on the way from those developers, the Gotham Organization and Iliad Development. [more]

From left: Sherwood Equities CEO Jeffrey Katz and 508 West 20th Street

Sherwood Equities is selling air rights near the High Line for $500 per square foot and capitalizing on the quickly vanishing supply of buildable space in West Chelsea.

The development firm told the New York Post that about two-thirds of the 20,000 square feet of air rights it acquired when it bought the High Line-adjacent building shell at 508 West 20th Street for $7.3 million last April is in contract for the sky high price. [more]

From the September issue: In 2009, the landscape was bleak for New York City real estate lawyers.
Many of the big firms tried shifting people between departments to deal with the slowdown in real estate business caused by the economic downturn. Then, they let people go through attrition, and even outright layoffs. But it still wasn’t enough, lawyers said.
“When we were at our smallest, we still weren’t as busy as we’d like to be,” said Robert Ivanhoe, chairman of the New York office and the global real estate practice at Greenberg Traurig. “Even after the downsizing, we weren’t at capacity.”
Ivanhoe, though, was happy to be speaking in the past tense. In the last six months, he said, Greenberg Traurig’s New York real estate practice has increasingly focused on transactions, rather than the debt restructuring work that his and other firms fell back on to keep busy in the lean years.
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Sherwood Equities has acquired a West Side development site where Extell Development had once planned to build a 60-story hotel and residential tower for more than $42 million, according to Real Estate Weekly. The site, at 356 10th Avenue, near the Related Companies’ planned Hudson Yards development, was assembled for at least $44 million by Extell, but after its financing partner backed out of the project, the company handed it back to lender Barclays Capital Real Estate last year in a deed in lieu of foreclosure. Barclays, which held a first mortgage valued at nearly $30 million on the property, hired Massey Knakal Realty Services to help sell the site in March. [REW]

Sherwood Equities has purchased a stalled development site near the High Line for $7.3 million and is looking to take advantage of a special city zoning rule that would allow the transfer of the air rights to other West Chelsea properties. Sherwood executives told the Wall Street Journal that they’d like to build a one-story restaurant or gallery — a “very cool destination spot,” said Sherwood’s Ryan Nelson — in place of the four-story structure that currently sits at 508 West 20th Street. In exchange for building a low-scale project, Sherwood would be able to sell off its development rights to a special West Chelsea district created by a zoning rule in 2005. [more]

From left: Andre Balazs, Jeffrey Katz and 500 W. 21st St. (building photo source: PropertyShark)

After an investment group led by hotelier Andre Balazs and developer Charles Blaichman defaulted on its mortgage on a development site at 500 West 21st Street on the corner of 10th Avenue, the property has been taken over by a new group, Sherwood Equities, according to the Wall Street Journal. The original investors had planned to turn the High Line Park-adjacent property into a time share hotel when they bought it in 2007 for $50 million. [more]

The owner of One and Two Times Square — and their iconic neon signs — is behind Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to make the pedestrian plazas below a permanent fixture. That is, if it’s done right. Jeffrey Katz, the CEO and principal owner of Sherwood Equities, which owns the two buildings, told the New York Times that while the temporary Times Square pedestrian plazas lacked “a lot of forethought and design input,” a team of planners and stakeholders would “guarantee a world-class result” for the real thing. Further east, Sherwood is near-completion on its $20 million capital improvement at its Grand Central retail center, 370 Lexington Avenue. The company’s next building will most likely be green, Katz said, because “that’s what people want.” [NYT]

  
From left: 1600 Broadway, Cipriani Club Residences and 555 West 23rd Street

From the March issue:One in every 13 homes is in pre-foreclosure. Half are listed for rent or sale. This predicament isn’t taking place in the outer boroughs. It’s happening in Manhattan at a luxury condo. The building is one of dozens in Manhattan where multiple owners have fallen behind on their mortgages. This month, The Real Deal put together a top 10 list of buildings in Manhattan with the most units that received a pre-foreclosure filing in the last year. [more]

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From the February issue: While activity remains sluggish in the New York real estate market,
there may be pockets of opportunities for profits over the next few
years for those who invest wisely.
Experts point to three areas for investors looking to lay the
groundwork for a future fortune: office towers, land and multifamily
buildings.
First, a warning or two. Many of the properties sold will go to
insiders rather than victors in a public auction process. With few
assets available for cheap prices through public listings, “smart money
will use alternative paths to get to core real estate,” said Dan
Fasulo, managing director at Real Capital Analytics.
While there will be “opportunities to pick up quality assets at
attractive prices over the next year,” he warned that “investors who
feel like we’re going to fall off a cliff … will be greatly
disappointed.” [more]